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Comment by babar | Hacker News Reader

Why do people assume the Chinese government is not able to use similar techniques?

China doesn't have agreements with BT, AT&T etc which allow it to tap fibre in our countries at will. I'm sure they try some tapping, but they can't do it on the scale that GCHQ and the NSA have been outside China.

But they could easily have agreements with every chip fab to build back doors into every piece of networking equipment.

That's very unlikely nobody would have noticed them by now, if it were the case.

Do you mean - as unlikely as not spotting the weakening of encryption standards - for example by another branch of the same government (NIST/NSA)?

Those were spotted.

eventually.

This is exactly why Australia is very leery of letting the Chinese telecom hardware manufacturer Huawei have any of the contracts for networking hardware on the nascent National Broadband Network -- they are suspected of having ties to the Chinese government / army: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei#Security_concerns

My sister in law works for Huawei in Kenya. Her job (so far) has largely involved ripping out Siemens made mobile-telephony infrastructure and replacing it with Huawei-made mobile-telephony infrastructure. Such are today's instruments of empire.

So can the US.

You can packet-trace networking equipment you own.

You can't packet-trace a cloned switch port you don't know about.

The Chinese do not need any agreements to tap undersea cables and are more than capable of doing just that.

Sure, but they don't have the "home field advantage" that the NSA does, whereby much of the core internet infrastructure is housed in the US. I forget the exact number, but something like 70% of the world's internet traffic transits the US. (they mention this constantly in NSA-related articles)

But how much of the core infrastructure is made by the Chinese?

An astute question, considering the strange wifi-chips-in-irons story.

Are they? That's a very complicated thing to pull off and China isn't known for having the most advanced Navy (e.g. they can't secure their own oil tankers in the Persian Gulf) and they only have a small number of submarines.

How do you know that?

I would assume they use similar techniques within China and perhaps allied countries like North Korea and Cuba, but the US is performing wiretapping in at least the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Also, how much non-Chinese Internet traffic passes through China?

> and perhaps allied countries like North Korea and Cuba

Nobody is more distrusting of each other than two communist countries.

Well, when you eat off the hand of the other country you don't have much choice. Nobody actually asks you if you trust or not.

Disregarding for a moment that a state can not be communist (one defining characteristic of communism being absence of state), only socialist, North Korea has long disassociated itself from communism. Since the 90s at least there has been a systematic removal of any mention of Marxism, communism and related terminology from the constitution, laws and official discourse.

http://hidemyass.com/proxy-list/

I'm sure lots of botnets use China servers as well.

The Chinese were targeting specific journalists and critics. Presumably to harass them.

I'm not saying the US doesn't do that, but the evidence is not as clear.

Maybe you didn't notice the detainment of Greenwald's partner by the GCHQ whereby they demanded him to turn-over/destroy whatever he had.

Further, the break-in to Greenwald's residence and theft of his machine.

As well as the visit to the Guardian and destrution of machines....

The evidence is crystal.

As much as the UK government would probably love being confused for the US government, at least the visit to the Guardian and detainment of Miranda were both done by the UK.

And given how the UK government loves nothing more than to be the lapdog of the US, I have no doubts it was done entirely voluntarily.

Eagerly even, as an opportunity to show off just how extra exceedingly loyal minions they are.

Frankly, I have little doubt that the UK government participates so eagerly that just occasionally some of their US counterparts must be a little bit embarrassed on their behalf over seeing their total lack of self respect in trying to impress.

Exactly my thought. Making me embarrassed to a singel fact that I live in UK, as that happened.

Except you know, in that case the person actually did have classified documents of an allied nation on a thumbdrive on them.

Which you know - is still illegal to have. Though it's funny how the Guardian thoroughly underreported that fact.

When I last checked, in the US, it's actually not illegal for someone without a clearance to possess classified material. This is why newspapers can print unredacted classified documents and not immediately go to jail.

It is, however illegal for someone with a clearance to mishandle classified material. "Mishandling" includes "Permitting access to classified material to non-cleared personnel.". If you mishandle classified material you may be reprimanded, have your clearance revoked, be fined, or go to jail for a very long time.

It's also illegal to traffic it across international borders, which is why what foreign spies do is prosecutable. Which is the exact thing they were doing.

Good point, but the Greenwald-Snowden case is a little different. We all know the identities of the informants. The issue with the harassment of Miranda has nothing to do with espionage, it's just heavy handed.

In the case of the Chinese hackers, they were spying on reporters to discover their sources.

What they appeared to be looking for were the names of people who might have provided information to Mr. Barboza.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/31/technology/chinese-hackers...

AFAIK we don't have evidence of similar US spying for the purpose of blackmail, harassment, etc. because my concern is whether the NSA might use its sources for those ends.

The destruction of the Guardian's laptops was about ensuring they didn't get stolen by someone else - if you read the story at the time, the spooks actually wanted the Guardian to hand the laptops over but Guardian refused and destruction was a mutually agreed way out.

Miranda's detainment, confiscation of the memory sticks etc was to be expected - as far as the UK Government is concerned he's carry stolen state secrets.

What I don't really understand is why he flew through London carrying them, I believe Madrid has more routes to South American - I wonder if he was routed so he would be picked up for massive publicity.

They weren't actually. Google lied about that. It came out later that the real reason for the Chinese hacking gmail was to see which accounts had "lawful intercept" on them so they would know if their own spies had their cover blown. If the US knew about their spies, it was assumed that they would see the US sniffing the spies gmail accounts.

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-05-20/world/39385755...

I was referring to the NYT attacks,

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/31/technology/chinese-hackers...

Also, what kind of spy uses gmail? Sheesh.

Also, what kind of spy uses gmail? Sheesh.

The kind that is trying to maintain cover as a non-spy so uses the same email services as everybody else.

Sure but only an idiot uses their personal email account for work, right? Especially if your work can get you killed.

The point being made isn't that they would send sensitive data using gmail, it's that if they were compromised the NSA would most likely be reading the emails, and hacking Google would theoretically let the Chinese know if cover was blown if they could see evidence of the NSA listening in.

Of course, that means the joke's on them, because the NSA was listening to everyone...

how would you know whether NSA was listening in (for example by tapping google's links between datacenters) or not even if you successfully hack into Google's infrastructure? Not finding evidence of eavesdropping doesn't exclude that eavesdropping happened, so if that was the only purpose to hack Google, it doesn't seem worth the effort.

On the other hand if you want to read people's mail, then hacking into the provider is certainly an option.

I'm not sure I necessarily buy that explanation either, but I don't know enough of the facts of this particular story to know where it falls down or is supported.

On the other hand, we don't really know what the Chinese knew, or thought they knew, about Google and how it functioned WRT government surveillance. If they had reason to believe that Google would be cooperating with authorities and would have infrastructure in place to monitor email accounts that they could look for and identify if it was monitoring the accounts they were looking for, then this explanation makes a bit more sense.

> Google lied about that

Huh? There's nothing in the Post's information that would preclude both from having happened, so it's would be a stretch to call it a lie even from that article. But in fact, the original blog post[1] talks about multiple goals of the main attack, including listing the targeted attack that the GP is probably referencing as independent from the attack that "resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google". I think it's you that's confusing incidents.

> Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers.

edit: ah, and the GP wasn't even talking about the gmail accounts.

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china...

Why on Earth are you comparing a suppressive regime to the a western democracy?

Of course the Chinese gov is able to do so without any repercussions. The difference should be that in a democracy you can't abuse your power without repercussions.

Maybe it "should" but democracy and domestic popular opinion doesn't traditionally have a significant impact on US foreign policy. Except for big wars.

<i>"The difference should be that in a democracy you can't abuse your power without repercussions."</i>

Do you see the irony? Western governments are abusing their powers.. and they are getting away with it. Democracy means nothing if the government doesn't hold itself accountable.

No, democracy means nothing if the people don't hold the government accountable.

Relying on the government to hold itself accountable makes democracy no different from monarchy.

Right, but as long as cable tv works and fast food restaurants are open the mass majority of people won't do anything about it.

More importantly, whats the difference between Chinese and American government when it comes to privacy?

That the US intervenes domestically and in Europe, L. America, Middle East, etc, whereas China is mostly concerned with itself.

The terrible things the Chinese government does aren't being done to you.

Those things aren't being done to most Chinese people, either. And they are being done to some Americans now, and increasingly so.

The Chinese are honest about it !

Because they have hundreds of their employees doing shifts of skript kiddie hacking over the open Internet. That is why "people assume the Chinese government is not able to use similar techniques."

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